roll away the stone
by TolkienGirl
Summary: As for the woman who's haunted his every step for every age since four—she's standing right in front of him. (Dean and Mary, Season 12 premiere. No slash.)


Dean doesn't know if he's getting old. He wasn't supposed to—he should have been in the ground at twenty-seven, or sooner. He was supposed to die a vessel. He was supposed to die a bomb.

Maybe he wasn't supposed to make it out of the house that night, back in 1983.

But here he is, ten years out of Hell, ten hours from a strange salvation.

As for the woman who's haunted his every step for every age since four—she's standing right in front of him.

He doesn't know what to say, but Sam isn't here to be his voice, and so he finds his words like he's found things all his life: reaching in the dark.

He tells her, she believes him, and he believes in her.

.

Sam's missing. Dean can never have them all. They pile into the car that holds them all together—and Dean remembers the car that night, orange flames flickering against the glossy blackness, and Dad as stiff as death.

That was beginning.

This is a beginning.

They look for Sam. And in between the long miles, miles of dead-ends, and explaining technology to his mother and humanity (as always) to Cas, Dean keeps seeing himself in the late-night mists on the road. He sees himself at ten, and sixteen, and twenty-five. It's like he knows himself as someone other, someone outside. He can hear his raw voice on the bridge in Jericho, _Don't talk about her like that_ , because Dean Winchester was trained to only believe in nightmares, but there was one tiny dream that lived in him, that he didn't want to stamp out.

He always thought that was Dad, trying to stamp out the dream. But maybe it wasn't, because Dad—Dad had that dream too, it just looked like vengeance to him. The hunt kept Mom alive for Dad, and Dean kept Mom alive in his head because he had to.

Funny, how much that dream always hurt.

And now he's driving down the road to save his brother (again), and his best friend is staring unblinking at the gray night, and his mother—Mary Winchester, the legendary, the angelic, the untouchable—she's in the back seat. She's sleeping.

It's like when Sam was a baby, and Dean used to watch him sleep and feel like the lump in his throat that kept him from talking was getting so big it might go away all together.

It was when Sam started talking that Dean really found his voice again. He had to, because there was something else to save.

He doesn't say a word, though, watching those mists shift over the road. It's too late, even if it's in a good way. Dean can't go back to the ten, crying silently into a motel pillow, or to sixteen, drinking too much already, or even to twenty-five, needing his brother as no one and everyone in the lonely world has _needed_ since the start of time. Dean can't go back and say, _you'll see her again_ , can't fan that spark of a dream into flame.

 _You're here now._ _That's all that matters._

The voice in his head is always Sam's.

.

For some reason, it's the way Mary talks about John that rankles with him most. And that makes little sense in the grand scheme, the good little soldier scheme of twenty-odd years, so Dean just doesn't bother arguing. He loves his father, and hates that he died for him. It's complicated, and Dean would need Sam to bridge that gap.

But then, Sam has always been ahead of the curve with Dad. As a teenager, he was the one leveling challenges at paternal authority. In his twenties, he was the one to question their upbringing. And now, in the latest years, when Dean's finally (maybe) ready to admit that there's a part of him that's angry with Dad—Sam is the one who seems ready to be benevolent, to forgive.

Dean looks at his mother across the diner table, where they're using the Wi-Fi to track Sam, looks at how beautiful she is—just as he remembers—and thinks, there'll be time enough for her to find out how much thirty-three years broke her boys apart and put them back together.

He hopes she'll figure out who to forgive, like Sam does, and then find out how to forgive them.

If she doesn't—

And Dean's chest tightens, just as it does when he thinks of Sam, wherever the hell he is. It's the pain Dean's known all his life.

But then Cas says, "I think I found something," and Mary looks eager, catches Dean's eye and smiles.

And for just one second, one spark of a dream of a second, Dean doesn't feel like he's reaching in the dark.


End file.
